The Hateful Morons pour out their bile

CINTRA WILSON

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 24, 1996

DEAREST Many and Varied Readers:

Every once in a great while, I print a letter from the evil-and-crazy-way-out-on-a-limb contingent. I always recognize these letters the moment I pull them with my sterilized tongs out of the mailbox. The handwriting is boxy and jagged and looks nervous and palsied, like the writer just combatted an amphetamine seizure by swallowing a box of Vivarin. Often, they come in alarmingly safe looking envelopes, such as something dusty-pink and vellumy your maiden aunt might use. Often there are Easter Seals or some other crisp, simple quasi-religious decoration.

Like balding, fat, ineffectual, pasty little vermin that sit in their lonely ham radio shacks spreading ill-informed White Power propaganda and chastising homosexuals on-line, one pictures these zealot letter-writers hunched over a linoleum table covered with brown burn marks and empty bottles of rubbing alcohol, cheap menthol cigarette butts, yellowed and frayed newspaper clippings, carbon paper (the zealot does not believe in photocopies), dirt-encrusted ballpoint pens that have the four different primary color levers at the top, stacks of old magazines covered with a thin film of spattered hot-plate cooking oil coated with gray, linty dust and hair, weathered coffee-ringed photographs of old white relatives wearing suits and dowdy kitchen frocks, atomizers of pepper spray, old rusty Brillo pads with ribbons of hard soapy gristle adhered to them, and empty packages of brightly colored, fattening snack food that seems really whimsical and incongruous to the environment like "Pizza Dogs!" or

I picture the zealot sitting at this table in jaundiced yellow light that struggles in through the tinfoil and stained sheet-covered windows and composing these letters, muttering obscenities to him or herself all the while and watching "Wheel of Fortune."

This last letter was one of a barrage of letters following

"Stuck's" dilemma concerning her discovery of her boyfriend's cheating on her with a wide assortment of men. It came in a fine, beige safety envelope with a floral stamp, with a "Greenpeace for a Cleaner Earth" sticker on the back. I knew, however, the letter would be filled with blathering Satanic bile, because every single letter "I" on the envelope was dotted with deep, deliberate crazy-person circles, like a flock of black donuts. It read as follows: Cintra:

What is this woman doing running around with a FAG. It's so UNCHRISTIAN. ALMOST ALL FAGS HAVE AIDS. They have so many partners even they can't keep count. They spread AIDS around like Christmas candy. They just don't care. Why? Why? Is this UNCHRISTIAN woman having sex outside of marriage anyways. To people like her: You deserve to get whatever you get. BURN IN HELL. HAVE SEX. GET AIDS. DIE.

Now, journalists like myself get letters like this from time to time, and frequently we just shudder and go

"euuuuk" and wad them up and throw them away, which is precisely all that they merit. Still, I think that letters like these are important, especially in the face of communities like the Bay Area that are completely overrun with the types of sparklin' New Agers and New Age sensibilities that might incline one to forget that dumb evil and crazy people who are totally unredeemable and cannot be salvaged actually exist. This is easy to do in a liberal Utopia, and I think it is unhealthy when people start making excuses for and empathizing with Hateful Morons, saying things like "Oh, that poor soul, they must have had a really hard life" or trying to find some glimmer of wounded animal within the soul of the perpetrator.

Complacent and life-loving, New Agers no longer have any teeth for the enemy and simply become fat and declawed art-loving peaceniks in expensive German comfort shoes and wheat-colored sweaters, listening to books on tape by Deepak Chopra and benignly going about their tasteful rounds from bookstore cafe to ceramic art faire, forgiving everybody with an indiscriminate abundance of spirit that I find to be completely worthless. What good is an expansive loving spirit if it doesn't mercilessly weed out the weak and filthy?

I will have much more respect for the New Agers when the revolution begins, and I witness a few of them dragging abrasive "Christian" hatebombs like the author of the above letter out into the street and hacking them into boullion-sized chunks with machetes. Only then will I feel that they do not shirk the janitorial labor of fighting for a higher moral universe and are doing more than pretending to be concerned and helpful from the plump leather seats of a heated car. Thank you.